Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a very brief contribution to this debate, given the pressure of other business before the Senate today. I think that the evidence that there is a problem in Australia with academic bias is very clear as a result of this inquiry. I do not pretend that the problem is widespread, in the sense that it affects a large number of students in a large number of institutions, but I think that the evidence is compelling and irrefutable that there is an issue with bias in the case of some students. I have little doubt that in some cases that political bias will affect students with left-wing perspectives faced with a lecturer or tutor with a right-wing bias, but there was no evidence of that put before the committee. I have no doubt that it must exist. But the evidence of the other kind of bias was put before the committee and in sufficiently compelling detail to suggest that it needs to be examined as an issue confronting Australian universities.

I put to the Senate that what they should take from this inquiry is not a sense of denial of there being any issue or problem—which is, with respect, what we can take from Senator Marshall’s comments today—but rather an acceptance that, if there is an issue, even if it affects a small number of students, it is incumbent on universities, as places which are properly regarded as bastions of intellectual freedom and the capacity to express and articulate thoughts in a way which we may not have the freedom to do in other parts of our society, to facilitate devices to prevent any student having his or her grades affected or his or her capacity to express views in an academic context compromised by virtue of the existence of bias in universities.

The coalition senators’ additional comments in their dissenting report are, I think, well worth considering—that is, not that the government rush to legislate to deal with this issue, but that the universities themselves, who have said repeatedly that they have robust mechanisms for dealing with problems of competence and quality in teaching, actually address this issue specifically and allow it to be properly expressed in the form of a charter that sets out the freedom not only of academics but of students in those institutions. If we accept that there is an issue there—and there certainly has been an issue raised in the Australian context of the freedom of academics to express their views—you cannot not deal with the issue of the freedom of students at the same time. You have got to deal with both of them. If we accept that there is an issue about the way in which these problems are addressed in our universities—and even those opposite would concede that on occasions that has occurred—we should deal with it in the way suggested in the dissenting comments of coalition senators. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.